Examining Hurricane Katrina from every angle

On Saturday morning U.S. Senator David Vitter, a Jefferson Parish resident, woke up to learn that a major hurricane was headed toward Louisiana. He just stared at the television with his wife, Wendy, and shook his head. He had one prevailing thought: Welcome to the Big One. “We both said let’s not kid around,” Vitter recalled. “We’re leaving.” While his wife started packing the minivan, Vitter called his brother Al, a mathematics professor at Tulane, and his sister Martha in Atlanta. They were worried about their mother. She lived on Vincennes Place in Uptown, which was susceptible to flooding. Moreover, she had an enlarged heart. Around the clock medical attention — or the possibility of it — was necessary. A decision was made to evacuate her by airplane to Atlanta, ASAP. With that plan in motion, David Vitter headed up Highway 61 to Memphis, dropped his family off at a relative’s house, and then flew back down to Louisiana. He was going to remain available in Baton Rouge, much like Mitch Landrieu, at the EOC. Vitter would sleep in a dormitory room provided by the state police and take part in the relief efforts. That Saturday afternoon, however, Vitter couldn’t help but wonder why Mayor Nagin wasn’t calling for the mandatory evacuation of the city. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Vitter later said. “But it was clear to me very early Saturday that, yes, it should have been ordered.”⁴²

Ronald Mack Jr. of the Seventh Ward thought all those people evacuating on I-10 and I-55 were fools. Everybody knew the Big One always veered east when it approached the mouth of the Mississippi — everyone, that is, except his wife. “I was going to suck it up,” he later recalled. “But she starting nagging me. She made us leave for Houston.”⁴³ Officials could count themselves successful in the cases of Ambrose, Vitter, Travers, Mack, and hundreds of thousands like them. Last-minute evacuation was preferable to no evacuation at all.

VII
But there were many who heard the dire predictions for Katrina and decided to stay put. Kenny Bourque, a twenty-two-year-old bartender from the French Quarter, counted himself among their ranks. The only precaution he took, as he brazenly defied meteorologists, was purchasing a life preserver for his dog — just in case of a flood.⁴⁴ He adhered to the spiritual lament that goes, “Bury me down in New Orleans/so I can spend eternity aboveground/you can flood this town/but you can’t shut the party down/ain’t no drownin’ the spirit.” Street performer Gaetano Zarzana, full of aperçus, told the Houston Chronicle he was going to “have fun and watch God’s fury” and “hang out in Johnny White’s bar on Bourbon Street and watch the flood come up.”⁴⁵ Then there was Michael Barnett, who decided to hole up in his office on Poydras Street in the central business district, stating on Saturday that he was determined to keep an hourly blog of Katrina. “Like when P. Diddy sang, ‘we ain’t goin’ no where,’ ” he logged at 8:19 a.m. “Come on with it then, storm. Bring me what ya got. Let’s see who wins.”⁴⁶ Officials could count themselves powerless in the cases of defiant citizens like Barnett, Bourque, and Zarzana.

Thousands of healthy, well-informed citizens simply made the personal decision that they didn’t want to leave. Some were traffic-phobic while others believed such natural forces as hurricanes were in the Lord’s hands. A few thousand of the unmovable were gamblers, long ago courting risk like a lover. There was a Good Samaritan contingent who wanted to keep an eye on their neighborhoods, and the doctors and nurses who just couldn’t leave. There were thrill seekers, tarot-card readers, and professional squatters. A parochial pride informed some New Orleanians’ decision to stay; this was their town, by God, and they weren’t going to abandon it in its time of peril. An unusually high number of boat owners stayed, convinced that — worst-case scenario — if their houses flooded, they could just sail away until the water receded. Some people saw Katrina as a chance to hole up and get long-overdue chores done, write delinquent thank-you notes, and file the tax extensions they’d been putting off. Taken all together, these people were a breed unto themselves. As the city emptied out, and New Orleans felt like a forlorn tomb, they had unknowingly volunteered to be first responders in the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history. A large part of the civic burden of saving the poor, infirm, elderly, and confused in Katrina’s wake would fall on their vigorous shoulders. It was getting late for everyone in southeastern Louisiana. Ninety-year-old Amantine Marie Verdin, a member of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe, lived in St. Bernard Parish with her mentally handicapped son Xavier. Another son, Herbert, and other relatives lived nearby. As the storm approached, Herbert’s daughter, Monique Michelle Verdin, drove down from her home in Baton Rouge to check on them all. “When I got to my grandmother’s house that Saturday,” Monique said, “I found her frying fish and cooking shrimp étouffée. My father, Xavier, and my first cousin were all at the house living like it was just another day.” Monique took a box of her grandmother’s keepsakes, and wrote out a list of storm precautions. When she left, though, nothing had much changed. “Clothes were drying on the line outside,” she said. “Xavier was sitting on the porch.”⁴⁷

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